In haste one evening while making dinner I threw away a potato that was spoiled on one end. The rest would have been
redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail it became the consort of coffee grounds, banana skins, carrot peelings. I pitched it onto the compost where steaming scraps and leaves return, like bodies over time, to earth.
When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay fork to air the pile, the potato turned up unfailingly, as if to revile me—
looking plumper, firmer, resurrected instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow until I might have made shepherd’s pie for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning hand-me-down clothes on the line. "